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The early days

I started writing fiction seriously in the early 90s. I took a class from Barbara Greenwood in Toronto and I was in Peter Carver’s writing for children workshop through George Brown College for a couple of years. I also started my own writers’ group. I’m a big believer in writers’ critiquing groups and wrote an article called "'What do I know from Kosher?' Lessons Learned from a Cross Cultural Writers' Group" (which I will post when I figure out how to post a pdf). Writing groups are not without their challenges and an alternate title was “Writing groups I’ve loved, lost, and ditched.”

Dead Frog on the Porch is my debut novel but not my first manuscript. I started by writing a time travel based on the life of my late grandmother who came to Canada from Russia in the early 1900s. I am still working on this novel; the next draft will take it from a middle grade time travel to a whole different genre.

I'd received some good feedback from publishers on my Dead Frog on the Porch manuscript when it was initially sent out about ten years before, but I knew I needed to do some rewriting. I did a major rewrite and sent it to my writers' group. After getting their feedback, I did another rewrite. It was ready to go. This was the version I started sending out. Agonizing over the query and the synopsis came next. It felt like I had spent nearly as much effort writing the query as I did the manuscript!

Jan can spot a cliché at ten paces but never met a comma she didn’t splice. Jan has a profound, and somewhat disturbing, addiction to sour ju jubes. Jan worships the sasquatch as a superhero for writers for his ability to eschew human contact and spend long hours in his cave. She loves lentil soup more than lentil soup loves itself. When not picking cat hair off her sweater, Jan can be found in her sasquatch writing cave with a mug of chai tea writing her next work in progress.
Dead Frog on the Porch is her debut mystery novel for young readers (Gumboot Books 2009). The second book in the MegaByte Mystery series Dead Bird through the Cat Door launched in 2010.